Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming for Monday, February 16th. I'm Mac Watson.

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Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak tells Cowboy State Daily that his agency is investigating last week's incident in which a Teton County GOP leader handed checks to lawmakers on the state House floor after adjournment. Cowboy State Daily's Clair McFarland reports that the sheriff's investigation is different from the House's decision to launch their own examination.

"There's an important distinction here, because when the House on Thursday was talking about launching its own internal investigation for possible legislative misconduct, bribery, that was an administrative, non-criminal act, and that that seven person committee is going to be convening sometime during the session, and it'll have four days to just put something together and send it on to the House. But when they were debating forming that panel, it was Representative Chris Knapp who said, 'Maybe this is something that we should forward to a criminal agency, that we should ask the AG about." And even though the House didn't take him up on that, that is more the nature of what Sheriff Kozak is doing, is looking for criminal probable cause, or as he put it, 'to clear the names of the innocent wherever the investigation leads.'"

The controversy erupted on Wednesday when Rep. Mike Yin of Jackson urged his colleagues not to vote for introduction of a bill Rebecca Bextel championed that seeks to curb affordable housing mitigation policies like those prevalent in Teton County and its seat of Jackson.

Read the full story HERE.

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Speaking of the legislature, lawmakers get back to work and start the second week of the Budget Session. Cowboy State Daily's Clair McFarland reports that this week, it's all about amendments and funding.

"So what we can expect are amendments on the budget starting next week. And now they're going to roll up their sleeves, and they're going to maybe have a tug of war with the joint appropriations committee and some of the changes it made, and then hopefully each chamber gets a budget that is satisfied with before both chambers try to reconcile the budget with one another. The other big thing that's going on is they're trying to recalibrate education, which means they're trying to do a full scale reassessment on what we pay for education."

Even though a court order for education recalibration is on pause right now, the Senate is taking it up by introducing a recalibration bill unanimously.

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For decades, the Hitching Post Inn in Cheyenne wasn't just a hotel; it was the most powerful spot in Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily's Zak Sonntag reports that nearly every legislator stayed there and that's where deals were finalized.

"What made it special was the people in the management and the way that they went out of their way to really cultivate a culture there…in hindsight, pretty fascinating to consider that you had virtually an entire legislature all bunking at the same place during the session…and there would be receptions, seven nights a week, dinner parties. People were having conversations at the bar late in the night, and it was kind of like the way they described it. It was always about law making. You were always working on fixing some problem with some bill, but the atmosphere was so much more congenial and personable at the Hitching Post than it was up at the Capitol, and so they were able to move things just in an entirely different way."

It was not just local politicians who stayed at "The Hitch." Spiro Agnew, the U.S. vice president to Richard Nixon, stayed at the historic inn. A fire bro